


the only difference between a hymn and a requiem is your state of living

by acosmic



Category: Granblue Fantasy (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:06:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28095882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acosmic/pseuds/acosmic
Summary: Lucifer goes missing and the Singularity has Sandalphon help her find him.
Relationships: Djeeta & Sandalphon (Granblue Fantasy), Lucifer/Sandalphon (Granblue Fantasy)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	the only difference between a hymn and a requiem is your state of living

**Author's Note:**

> written for ["Our Side of Paradise,"](https://twitter.com/lucisanzine) a LuciSan zine (@lucisanzine).
> 
> takes place post-wmtsb, but before wmtsb2 . my warning before anyone reads this is that lucifer is incapacitated the entire time

This is the story so far: an understudy for a god was created and he was loved, intensely so, but the lover was not used to feelings—did not know how to feel emotion, how to express love at all, and bottled it up inside. 

This is what the god wanted: an equal. The god did not have equals, he stood alone, the paragon of existence, to be forgotten by all, and he was deeply afraid of losing the one person who he was not a god to. So he ignored the festering wound that was the spare’s heart.

This is what the understudy wanted: not to be an understudy. As soon as he was aware of the purpose of his existence, he was not enough and never enough. He was not good enough to be a god, good enough to be a person, good enough to stand by the god’s side.

This is what the world wanted: to keep turning.

At some point, the understudy tried to end the world. God doesn’t deign to come onto mortal soil unless there’s a problem, but the world does not end so easily. It bends but does not break. The hero is there, the villain is foiled, simple as that.

At some point, the god disappeared from the world.

At some point, the hero went looking for the god. The Singularity, the axis the universe turns upon, heard a rumor—because where else do you hear about these things besides a rumor—of an island that belonged to a collector, a primal beast goes the rumor because mankind does not want to claim such hideous obsessions, where He was taken as a prize, the centerpiece of avarice: a god itself, beyond the mere machinations and tools of the Astrals. (But this god is a tool himself.)

At some point, the hero and villain found the god. There was the girl in blue. There was this god’s creator and his hand and another’s speaker. Too many gods and gods’ representatives in one place makes for a mess.

At some point, the story ends.

* * *

This is the story in motion.

* * *

He is a new creation, still chubby-cheeked. They say it’s baby fat, but he was never a baby and never a child. He understands that there is a  _ before _ for the ordinary, the Skydwellers, though he doesn’t understand what that precisely is.

Lucifer has a habit of staying in one of the gardens to relax, as much relaxing the Supreme Primarch is able to do, and he’s developed a habit of following. They sit across from each other at one of those little tables, wrought metal painted white. He scrapes off a strip of the paint with his nail while Lucifer asks a question.

“Have you come up with a name for yourself?”

“Are names that important?”

“I think so,” Lucifer says. “I was not given a name until recently.”

“What were you called before?”

“The Supreme Primarch.”

“And that wasn’t enough?” The strip has become a rectangle under his careful picking. The metal is disappointingly a dull gray below and his fingers are flecked white. They stick to the sweat of his palms when he tries to wipe them off.

“It’s not about not being enough,” Lucifer says. There is an air about him that makes every word he says sound of utmost importance. “It’s something that changes your worldview entirely, to the point you cannot imagine not having it before. It may not be the core of ‘self,’ but it’s a pillar.”

“I don’t know—that seems complicated.” There’s a hideous screech of a noise as his nails scrape too deep into the metal and he flinches. Lucifer does not. “Why don’t you give me a name?”

“All right… What about ‘Sandalphon’?” Lucifer does not smile, but there is something so gentle in his gaze, and Sandalphon, newly christened by a benevolent god’s intent, has to look away.

Lucifer carefully turns Sandalphon’s hands, his fingers cool against Sandalphon’s skin, to have his palms face-up and wipes them off with a handkerchief—the flecks blend into the fabric. 

“Nice to meet you, again I suppose, Sandalphon,” Lucifer says and Sandalphon knows he should say something, anything really, back but seeing Lucifer so close to him—his hands, not his face but that matters little, really—and seeing the care he puts in wiping them clean, a menial task that the Supreme Primarch shouldn’t bother with, and seeing the edges of Lucifer’s eyelashes, the contrast between their color, or lack thereof, and the shadows they cast empties his mind.

“Thank you,” he manages, unsure if it’s for the name or the handkerchief. “Thank you, Lucifer.”

* * *

He was judge, jury, and executioner, but somehow, foolishly, Sandalphon thought that meant He couldn’t have something of his own. A friend, a confidant—but then where did he place himself in Lucifer’s world—so it’s strange, how, out of all the emotions Sandalphon expected on Lucifer’s face, it wasn’t anger or disappointment or pity, but a lonesome sadness.

Like He knew it’d turn out this way.

Like it was inevitable, that Sandalphon would start the cataclysms and Lucifer would have to end it.

Lonesome indeed.

* * *

A voice is calling to Sandalphon:

_ You were loved. You were loved. You were loved. Do you understand how loved you were? Do you? _

How do you argue with a fact of life? How do you argue with the constancy of gravity? The sky is blue, the islands float—you don’t until you try to unmake them. 

So Sandalphon didn’t understand, doesn’t understand.

The voice becomes accusingly sharp—is this his conscience? Does he still have one? Does it matter, whether he had one and lost it, or if Lucifer never granted him one to begin with? Whatever it is, it says the same old thing over and over and over and over again. Even his guilt manifest is repetitively boring. He sits and watches the skies shift shades of blue, because that’s all he can do beyond answer the useless questions he asks himself.

But then there is a  _ crack _ and he is pulled or pushed or unmade, his skin splitting apart to reveal muscle and sinew, bones cracking apart with the sound of flint scraping for a spark, and he spills himself out. But to begin with, Sandalphon doesn’t have a body and all of that entails, flesh, bone, innards. Whose blood is pouring out, whose skin is coming apart like paper, whose heart in whose chest is pounding so loudly? Whose crumbling corpse is sullying the memory of their garden?

Then he wakes up.

The first sensation Sandalphon feels is how cold it is comparatively, at least, to inside the cocoon and he thinks,  _ What the hell is this. _

His sight blurs and he sees someone lean over him. He thinks once again, _ What the hell. _

“Hiya,” the Singularity says. “I’m going to, uh, put you over my back.”

Her voice comes through as if he’s underwater. He wishes he had eaten before he tried to end the world so he can throw up on the Singularity now. He insists this is not out of spite. 

Sandalphon opens his mouth but he can’t feel any sensation, not even when she hoists him like a ragdoll over his shoulder. He tries to move his fingers but gives up when he realizes that he can’t see well enough to tell if his fingers are moving.

“I’ll tell you everything later,” the Singularity tells him. He can dimly sense his feet dragging against the floor. “Why I even bothered busting you out of your weird cocoon-nest-thing and all that but time is probably of the essence and you kinda look like a newborn foal.”

He wants to argue about newborn foal bit, but his head is spinning. Apparently staying awake after the change in environment was not helping him acclimate, who would’ve thought, and his head pounds with each of the Singularity’s steps.

He imagines someone patting his shoulder, gentle and comforting. Michael would be stern, Gabriel bubbly but pushy, Uriel mistaking roughness for familiarity, Raphael wouldn’t touch him at all, not because it was Sandalphon but because it simply wasn’t habit for him.

It was not Lucifer, could never be Lucifer, for if Lucifer still treats him kindly then what was the point of what he did?

He can be forgiven, but only because he didn’t matter, because he wasn’t enough of a threat, cataclysms and all. He can be forgiven because he was loved, but that wasn’t good enough for the world or for him.

His consciousness recedes.

* * *

It’s easy to guess where Sandalphon is when he wakes up, even in the dark he can see the wooden walls, feel the swaying of a ship flying in the sky.

It’s harder to guess why he isn’t tied up and shoved in the engine room as payback for everything, but this line of thought is interrupted when he hears the tell-tale grate of a chair being pushed back as its occupant stands up.

“You don’t need to be so nice to him, Lyria.” The Singularity’s words comes out as a sigh.

“I know that I don’t need to, but…”

“You don’t have to say it.”

Sandalphon wonders if they really should be having this conversation in his room, even if it’s only borrowed. The door opens and closes with a creak, and he assumes both had left until the mattress—he’s surprised that they gave him one in the first place, it feels like a strange indulgence—sinks as the girl in blue sits down, carefully avoiding Sandalphon’s legs. There’s a stripe of pale moonlight coming in from a slit in the window, and it illuminates the curtain of her hair as she kicks her feet, scuffing her heels against the floor.

She doesn’t say anything, so he doesn’t either.

She breathes in when Sandalphon breathes out, and Sandalphon falls asleep like that, letting her take up the space where he isn’t.

* * *

“So,” the Singularity says, leaning over the table with fingers entwined. “Basically, Lucifer’s gone.”

The leaning in does not help her frazzled madman look: her hairband missing, the ribbons on her top hanging loose, and a suspiciously bright gleam in her eyes. Sandalphon does not think he looks much better, especially after he spat the coffee they gave him at  _ Lucifer’s gone _ .

The Singularity continues without acknowledging Sandalphon’s reaction, “No one knows what happened to him, including the other primarchs, so obviously they’ve put it to me to find him.”

She stops to help as the girl in blue carefully wipes the spillage up. Their own cups remain untouched, filled to the brim with coffee gone a pale beige from a wasteful amount of cream and sugar.

“I don’t see how I’m relevant to this,” Sandalphon says.

“You’re unexpectedly bad at lying,” the Singularity deadpans. She swirls a spoon in her mug, the coffee spilling in rivulets down the sides each time she hits it with the satisfying sound of metal on ceramic. She still doesn’t drink it. “Moving on, because we have Siero, I’ve learned that there’s a chance he’s on a certain abandoned island where a primal beast lives, so.” She points at Sandalphon with the spoon. “This is the part where you come in, because you know him best. Better safe than sorry, with this sort of thing.”

“Why are you assuming that I’d help you?”

The Singularity makes this knowing face at the girl in blue, faintly smug, and the girl in blue just exasperatedly says, “ _ Djeeta _ .”

She turns back to Sandalphon and says, more pointedly than Sandalphon would prefer, “Because if you’d destroy the world to get Lucifer to look at you, even if it’s just to  _ really _ look at you, you’d do something as simple as this.” 

A pause.

“You can think of it as atonement or punishment or whatever you want, but it was awful getting here, just ask Rackam, so I’d appreciate anything.”

The pause continues as a suspended moment of the girl in blue looking at the Singularity looking at Sandalphon who just looks right back.

“Lyria thought you’d be receptive to kindness,” she goes after the silence passes more firmly into awkwardness. She has a furrow in her brow as if she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to say that. It was a pretty rude thing to say that only people like the Singularity and the girl in blue could get away with, but, between them, only the Singularity would actually say it. “And all things considered, that seemed on the mark, so we didn’t tie you up or anything.”

“I didn’t put it like  _ that _ ,” the girl in blue retorts. “I understand how he—you felt about not understanding. Your purpose or your place in the world or who you are, to yourself and other people or… You know what I mean.”

Sandalphon stands suddenly, the dull thud of his heartbeat pounding in his ears because he  _ does  _ know what she means and he’s going to remember past voices discussing him like a dissected corpse.

“Sandalphon!” the girl in blue calls, scrambling over the bench.

“We’re leaving tomorrow morning, right before sunrise,” the Singularity, still-seated, tells him as he makes for the dining hall’s exit. “Got it?”

“All right.” He sounds so tired already. He stops at the entryway, one hand on the doorframe, and says, “The coffee was shit, by the way.”

“I know. I made it.” She laughs, and it’s something derisive and bitter, a bark. “Why did you think I didn’t drink any?”

Sandalphon goes back to his room, ignoring the glances of the other crewmembers as they see him and then the girl in blue a step behind him, and throws himself onto the bed. He wonders absentmindedly why he doesn’t leave this godforsaken ship and its godforsaken captain but he knows and he hates that he knows.

Like the night before, the girl in blue sits on the mattress, careful to avoid the sprawl of his limbs, and, unlike the night before, tells him, “Don’t worry. We’ll find him,” and he lets her stay until he falls asleep again.

* * *

When the girl in blue takes him to where they’re going to be leaving, he expects the rest of the mainstays of the Singularity’s motley crew—the empire’s traitor, the airship captain, the mage apprentice, and the primal beast who always looked at him in an uncomfortably knowing way, although that may have been how she looked at others in general—to be standing there ready to die at a moment’s notice but there’s just the Singularity tapping her foot.

“Sorry we’re late!” The girl in blue drags Sandalphon over by the arm to the transport boat, except the boat isn’t really a boat and more of a skiff and even that seems too generous.

“Uh,” Sandalphon says intelligently. He gestures vaguely at it. “Isn’t there going to be more people?”

The Singularity shakes her head. “They’re backup. Apparently there’s been issues in the past with big groups going in, so it’s just gonna be me, you, and Lyria.”

“Seven isn’t that large of a group.”

“That’s what  _ I _ said!” She shakes her head again but in agreement this time which feels stranger still. “But, hey, you’re such a big strong archangel that I’m sure you can protect us both.”

“Shut up,” Sandalphon says flatly. The back-and-forth makes them feel like wonderful friends, close enough to know that they can mock each other, when to stop, when to make a retort, except Sandalphon had thrown the Singularity off a cliff and standing near the edge of an expanse of sky, he can’t help but remember that and can guess that from the viselike grip on his hand as she helps him, unwillingly, into the skiff that she can’t help but remember too.

They both know if he apologizes it’d be meaningless.

The Singularity is surprisingly good at steering the vessel, and their tiny boat cuts through the air like a knife. The girl in blue waves at the waiting ship and Sandalphon asks, “Who are you waving to?”

She says, “I don’t know, but I do know there are people watching us go,” and they leave it at that.

When the dull throb of motion sickness hits, it must be visible on his face, because the girl in blue asks, concern all over her face, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he tells her. “If I throw up, I’ll do it on the Singularity.”

“Too bad. We’re about to land.” the Singularity laughs.  _ The cliff _ , Sandalphon thinks again.  _ She’s not going to forgive you and you don’t deserve it.  _ He pinches the bridge of his nose as they come in to dock. Actually looking at it, Sandalphon thinks the island looks rather unimpressive: a sparse forest with flashes of a white building visible through the trees, smaller in size in comparison to all of the bustling hubs of islands that he’s seen so far, no immediate signs of a primal beast or animal life at all.

“What did Siero warn us off of big groups for?” the girl in blue asks. “It seems pretty peaceful so far, and I don’t feel anything…”

“Well, it’s either Siero heard a false rumor, it’s something that only activates against larger groups, or someone else came first and deactivated the mechanism. If it’s the latter, we can just deal with it—ah, we’re coming in.” The Singularity turns the tiller roughly, and when they hit the ground, Sandalphon tumbles out from the force. He internally takes back the thought that the Singularity was any good at all with airships.

“Sorry!” the Singularity says, not sounding sorry at all. “I never stick the landing. Lyria, are you all right?” 

“I’m fine!”

“All right.” The Singularity helps her off the vessel while Sandalphon is still on his ass in the grass. “Before we start exploring, Sandy, come here.”

“Don’t call me that,” he says, but he obliges.

The Singularity smiles at him in an empty, distant sort of way, thinking of some longgone dream. “I’ve got something to tell you,” she says as she leans to whisper in his ear. It tickles and he flinches and she laughs because he flinched. People who try to destroy the world don’t flinch. “This doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. The universe doesn't care if we live or die, if Lucifer lives or dies. To it, he's always been replaceable.”

“I know.”

“As long as you know.”

The Singularity leans away. The girl in blue holds out her hand and Sandalphon stares at it until she takes his hand herself.

* * *

There is an irrelevant story in between here, settled along the seams, like grime you can’t dig out no matter how much you scrub and pick. An interlude, per say.

Once upon a time, there was a Creator and its creation, its Speaker.

The Creator went to sleep, leaving the Speaker stranded. There was an Astral that sought to upend the world, and the Fallen Angel that followed him.

The Speaker did not intervene then. The assumption was that there were others better suited for it. Supreme Primarchs and Primarchs and Singularities and so on.

The Speaker did not intervene in the next crisis. Or the next or the one after. The Speaker never intervened, content to play the fool, an actor inside and out.

Until one day, the Fallen Angel returned and the Supreme Primarch disappeared. One can connect the dots.

Helel was not sick of constancy. Helel could stay still forever, if Bahamut wished it. The issue was Bahamut was not here and he was and he was a little tired of it all. He, however, was not  _ sick _ of it. 

The world nearly ends every other week, but a limb of God occasionally believes he can do good

* * *

Despite the fact that, in its all its pristinely white-pearled glory, the central and only building of the island looked like a mausoleum, Sandalphon didn’t truly expect to find anything inside it beyond cobwebs and dust and the abandoned remains of a collection of tarnished silver and dirtied gold, perhaps in some sort of catacomb. It had seemed esoteric and quaint enough before they had opened the door.

“Oh,” the Singularity says, poking the prone body with her boot. “It’s not Lucifer, don’t worry. It’s that actor.”

“Actor,” Sandalphon tries for words. It’s hard to look at it, with the dried blood ruining the pristinely white-pearled glory of the floors. “The actor, that I apparently should know about.”

“Sandalphon, if you’re okay enough to make a snappy remark, help me turn the body over,” the Singularity directs him, and Sandalphon tries to touch and look at as little of it he possibly can. _Isn’t this the endpoint of what you tried to do?_ _Why be squeamish at the idea?_ “Lyria, can you go check if anyone’s tampered with the entrance to the catacombs beyond opening it?”

“Oh? These are catacombs too?” Sandalphon notes the high-pitched upturn of hysteria in his voice.

“It’s a scary looking door that opens to stairs going down, Sandalphon. I don’t know what else it can possibly be,” she says tersely as she leans over the doppelganger’s chest. “He’s not breathing.”

“Maybe he just forgot.”

“Sandalphon, go help Lyria.”

Dismissed, he sidles over to where the girl in blue is.

“Sandalphon!” The girl in blue smiles at him as he approaches, crouching by the catacombs’ entrance lighting a lantern with a box of matches. “I thought the door and steps looked fine, so I’m doing this now.”

The match between her fingers is still alight. He pinches it and it goes out in an acrid plume of grey, and the girl in blue’s nose wrinkles at the scent. She turns it into a grin as she stands up and says to Sandalphon, “Thank you. I’ll carry it for now.”

“Our designated lantern carrier is here!” the Singularity interjects. “Thanks, Lyria, but you can give it to  _ this _ guy—he can’t do much besides walk and talk!”

“Thank you, Lyria,” says the actor. “I’m glad to be in such fine company.”

Sandalphon kicks him in the shin. It’s instinct—hearing that voice with the same face and clothes, except stained with the remains of a wound and the knowledge that it isn’t Him.

He takes it in stride, sidestepping himself out of Sandalphon’s range casually.

“Oh, you were right,” the Singularity tells Sandalphon.

“What?”

“Anyway, let’s go in! Lucio told me the gist of what’s happened.” She takes the lantern from the girl in blue and hands it to Lucio, which doesn’t seem like his real name, but Sandalphon digresses, and they begin their descent downwards.

“So, basically,” the Singularity begins and Sandalphon dimly hopes that it won’t be followed by something like,  _ Lucifer’s gone _ , again. “The primal beast’s already dead. That was the cover story.”

“How?”

“Core—” The Singularity makes a crude back-and-forth gesture. “Yanked out. Apparently, the primal beast attached itself to a man who lived here, but, as the final jewel of his collection, he had the core removed. Lyria could try to focus to find it, but we have bigger fish to fry.”

At Sandalphon’s face, she goes, with her eyebrows raised, “Never heard of that turn of phrase? It’s popular in Auguste.”

“Never been.”

“What a sad life you must live, Sandy.” She shakes her head and shrugs her shoulders. “The white sand beach, the seafood so fresh you saw it kicking mere minutes before, the expanse of water so vast and deep that you can’t even comprehend it until seeing it—all of it is something that must be experienced for itself.”

“After all this,” the girl in blue says. “We should all go together! We can eat crab and drink melon juice and…”

“Wouldn’t something rarer be nice?” The Singularity sticks a finger into the air and waves it. “Like shark!”

“May I interrupt this conversation?” Lucio interrupts them with a smile. It looks strange on Lucifer’s features and Sandalphon has to look away. Having him carry the lamplight when he was the most bloody seemed to have been overlooked when deciding upon the job assignments.

“No,” Sandalphon says.

“All right then,” Lucio agrees very pleasantly which pisses off Sandalphon very much. “But are we turning left or right?”

Sandalphon looks at the intersection. Both paths were exactly the same to him, but the Singularity points her finger to the left. 

“I was feeling for any airflow,” she explains. “So that-a-way.”

That-a-way they go, falling in like behind the Singularity like ducklings.

* * *

“It does not seem like a wise decision to house a valuable collection underground,” Lucio says, hefting a crown studded with blood red rubies to the light, except it’s been snapped in half crudely. 

Sandalphon doesn’t know where they are at this point, the miscellany of the contents of each room, hall, and corner distracting him from remembering: wooden toys with faded paint, tea sets elaborately carved with vines and flowers with the silver tarnished, loose gems in rotting chests, an entire room of unopened envelopes, black ink labelling each to the same recipient.

He says, “I wouldn’t describe most of what we’ve seen as ‘valuable.’”

“It’s valuable to someone,” the girl in blue goes. “Isn’t that the point?”

Sandalphon imagines the garden—would it be overrun with weeds, or perhaps decaying—lost among the dead space. It’s hard to argue against.

* * *

After a hall that ambled for much longer than Sandalphon was comfortable with, there was a bend in the hall that led to an atrium with the altar as the centerpiece. Looking closer, there was a still body, not a corpse, absolutely not a corpse, on top of the altar and the deputy lieutenant, who had a much more formal uniform according to memory, standing next to it, and then, after a foolish split second, there was Sandalphon lunging at him, weapons be damned.

Belial had sighed and then Sandalphon was kicked with an audible crack and that was all that had led to the current predicament. 

The Singularity mouths,  _ Are you stupid _ , at him as she drags him up by the arm. There is blood on that arm, Sandalphon notes. He blinks, once, twice, but he still can’t discern which body part it’s from.

Belial twirls a knife between his fingers. When it catches the light, it glistens purple-black and pulses like it’s alive. Nothing screamed  _ sacrificing a god _ more than a cursed knife that was inhuman in its humanity.

“So,” Belial says. “Is this the part where I monologue? I was expecting a slightly smaller audience, but I’m not picky.” He winks at Lucio. 

“Keep it to five words or less,” the Singularity retorts. Her grip on Sandalphon’s arm tightens, and he has to pry her fingers off.

“Cilius beheaded, Lucifer has a head. Simple enough for you?” He tilts his head. “I made a few miscalculations with the timing—wasn’t able to take Lucifer’s head at the scene and then when his doppelganger shows up I underestimated the force it’d take to dispose of him. I like playing with my food as much as the next guy, but it’s starting to get boring when I see the same supposedly dead face over and over again.”

It’d only take ten seconds sprinting, ignoring whether he was able to sprint in his condition, to get to the altar, Sandalphon considers. After that, he just wouldn’t let go—really stupid, but it’s all he has. If the Singularity and the girl in blue just…

“Hey Sandy,” the Singularity says.

“What?” His eyes go from the knife—Belial gives an exaggerated shrug and taps his foot—to her. 

“I want that knife. It’s so revolting that it loops back to being cool.” She smiles like they’re sharing a joke and lowers her voice. “On three, okay?”

* * *

There’s no reason for Belial to ignore Sandalphon except that he’s so sure of his victory that it’s pointless, which is, in its own way, completely fair. The Singularity and the girl in blue are one thing, but Sandalphon’s the understudy dragged back from purgatory who trips, skinning knees and palms, in a mad attempt at a sprint. Hardly worth giving a second glance.

The altar makes Lucifer look smaller, more frail. Not a god at all, just a person needing saving, a damsel in distress. Some prince Sandalphon is. He notes the subtle rise and fall of Lucifer’s chest despite the ravages of a wound in his stomach.

When Sandalphon moves to pick him up, Lucifer sighs. His voice comes out as barely more than an exhale: “ _ Sandalphon _ .”

It’s like he’s back in the garden, an eon ago when he knew nothing and was even less, remade by a god’s intent—by his love.

“Forgive me for ignoring how you felt.”

Absolute nonsense.

* * *

“I’m sorry,” Djeeta tells Sandalphon, while she lifts Lucifer’s legs and he lifts Lucifer’s shoulders into the skiff. Lucio sits primly next to Lyria. “I underestimated Belial and couldn’t kill him.”

“I’m not forgiving you.”

“I guess that makes us about even.”

* * *

As Sandalphon emerges from the lower decks with Djeeta a step behind, Lyria takes both of their hands and leads them to the railing. Djeeta leans over it, idly looking over her shoulder to twirl a lock of Lyria’s hair that stretches between them like thread on a loom, while Lyria asks Sandalphon, “Were you holding Lucifer’s hand while he was asleep?”

“No.”

“He was. I saw, Vyrn saw, Lucio saw, everyone saw,” Djeeta interjects. She pokes his cheek and smiles when he pouts. “There’s no greater surety in life than your feelings, but you can’t admit that you held his hand.”

She pats him on the back goodnaturedly, and he lets her even though she does it with enough force to make him lean forward. He understands this is on purpose and understands that Djeeta needs time as much as he does. She lazily gestures to the sunset, all rosy pink and orange and gold. “Doesn’t this crap look like melted ice cream? Augustus specialty strawberry swirl.”

It does, or at least Sandalphon imagines it does, so he says, “With a caramel swirl.”

She laughs, high and clear in surprise, the opposite of how it was in the dining hall, and after a moment, Lyria laughs too, and as Sandalphon begins to laugh as well, he considers the best way to bottle up this memory to share with Lucifer.

**Author's Note:**

> it's a bit hard to put the words to how much it meant to me to write for this zine plus it's also the hardest AND longest thing i've ever written, but thank you for reading!


End file.
